Blighted

‘The Graves Are Walking,’ by John Kelly

Commenting on one of the many broken promises that Great Britain’s rulers made to their subjects in Ireland, G. K. Chesterton wrote: “It was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it. For he who has forgotten his sin is repeating it incessantly forever.” If there is one event that best captures this tendency to forget, it is surely the Irish famine, which killed more than a million people in the middle of the 19th century. John Kelly underlines Chesterton’s point in a different way with the title of his new history, “The Graves Are Walking.” The Irish cannot help remembering.

Kelly, the author of a well-regarded study of the Black Death, has produced a moving account of the famine. He begins by describing the sheer devastation that was brought upon the Irish people, beginning in 1845: a population of over eight million that decreased by a third, thanks to a combination of death and emigration. Through a prodigious and meticulous survey of primary and secondary sources, Kelly explains just how this occurred.

Ireland was dependent on the potato for sustenance, and “potato blight” — the plant disease — “slithered” (in Kelly’s word) through the Irish landscape in the mid-40s. Much of Europe also suffered from the blight, but it was not as reliant upon the potato as Ireland was, and experienced many fewer deaths. Still, the problem went beyond a lack of crop diversity.

Ireland was racked with conflict, often between Protestant landlords and Catholic tenants, and England’s protectionist Corn Laws — enacted at the behest of wealthy landowners — had made it nearly impossible to import much-needed food. However, even after the laws were repealed in June 1846, the famine continued. A new outbreak of the disease was especially virulent. “In a matter of 72 to 96 hours, the better part of the 1846 crop was obliterated, and not just the early crop,” Kelly writes. “So swift and comprehensive was the destruction, that a kind of mass disorientation seized Ireland.”

Adding to the problem was the so-called Poor Law Extension Act, which passed the costs of relief on to Ireland and contributed to the strain on landlords (actually considered too benevolent by members of the English government). They were forced to evict their tenants in what was already a harshly unequal society, and the result was overcrowded poorhouses and more mass starvation.

Kelly’s book does not really tell this sad tale in a linear fashion, but throughout he tries to emphasize the failures of British policy makers and the lack of attention given to the crisis in England. “Reading the skimpy press coverage from Ireland,” he says, “the average Briton would never have guessed she was sliding toward the abyss, but she was.” Although his prose can sometimes be a hindrance to his narrative, Kelly has produced a powerful indictment of the British mind-set in the 19th century, and of the British policy that resulted from it. Some have classified the famine as an act of genocide (the term was not in use at the time). Kelly calls this charge “discredited,” but his portraits of some of the more insufferable English statesmen are withering.

It is one of those statesmen who provides the clearest lesson of the famine. Charles Edward Trevelyan was a civil servant at the Treasury who oversaw much of the British response. God had “sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson,” he declared, and it “must not be too much mitigated.” Some time later he wrote that the famine was a “direct stroke of an all-wise Providence.” Malthusianism was much in the air in those days, and men like Trevelyan saw the famine as, among other things, a means of transforming Ireland by reducing its population and the number of small farms.

While the British did take some steps to ameliorate the crisis, Trevelyan and others withheld food at crucial times. This may not put the Irish famine up there with Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward or some of history’s other all-time-worst policies. But it is a reminder to beware of civil servants and politicians who think they are doing God’s work.

THE GRAVES ARE WALKING

The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People

By John Kelly

Illustrated. 397 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $32.

Isaac Chotiner is a senior editor at The New Republic.

A version of this review appears in print on October 14, 2012, on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Blighted. Today's Paper|Subscribe